Stack Overflow is so easy to get answers on, I'm starting to find myself asking questions on here as a starting point, before even googling or wikiing them. Is this considered rude, or do people like to answer simple questions as well?

I've tried searching SO directly, but either my SO-fu is weak or the built-in search engine is weak. Google and Bing both tend to give me good SO results. SO directly, not so much.
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Brian KnoblauchApr 8 '10 at 20:15

I would say no, you shouldn't ask questions without doing prior research, where "prior research" constitutes at least Googling and checking any obvious resources (e.g. for Java API questions, check the Javadoc). But even if you find the answer somewhere else, if you still think it's the kind of thing someone else might later come to SO to find out, I suppose you can ask it anyway and post an answer with the information you found. It seems to me that that would help make Stack Overflow what it was intended to be, a programming question-and-answer repository.

I've been guilty of asking questions even if I can give the answers myself. I want to see other people's opinion on things. It never hurts the quality of SO to have more good questions with good answers.

My first gut response is No. It's more from a personal standpoint that it seems that people are lazy in some respects... especially when the correct answer is the first hit on Google or the MSDN docs.

However, at the same time, Stack Overflow does offer something that Google doesn't... community certainty. If you are asking the question because you truly don't know the answer, then even if the top Google hit is the right answer, how do you know that? The voting system on SO at least gives the asker a bit of reassurance that the simple answer is in fact the right one, which provides a little extra value to the person asking the question.

I always bite my tongue, but sometimes I really want to say RTFM (but politely; I wouldn't actually say "RTFM"). It just gets my goat when people ask questions which can be answered perfectly by simply looking at the relevant extremely-accessible documentation (in my case that would be MSDN, either online or installed with Visual Studio). I'm talking about cases where you just place your cursor on the class, member, or keyword in question, and press F1... and the exact answer to your question appears before your eyes.

But I bite my tongue. Benefit of the doubt. (Plus I know the general philosophy of SO is to encourage all relevant questions)